Embedded Files
“My Alien Sister”
another almost true story by Teresa Troutman
The envelope arrived sandwiched between colorful notifications of the millions I may have already won and how I could, for a limited time, get free movies if I hooked up to satellite reception in every room of my house. This particular envelope sold nothing on the outside and gave nothing away about its insides. There were clues, however, from which universe the envelope had been sent. The postmark was from Florida. The zip code, like the address, was typed but the numbers were carelessly disordered. There was no return address. I held it as if it had come from Venus, whose interior surface screamed hot and boiling beneath a veil of sulfur colored clouds. The other clue in the universe of chance and impossible probabilities was that the space shuttle Columbia had blown up earlier that morning upon re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. It was what the whales had been trying to tell me.
I had been surfing earlier in the morning out behind the Jack-In-The-Box off the Pacific Coast Highway where the expensive state beach ended and the free city beach began that I saw a gray whale breach high into the sky. A whale lifting the entirety of its forty ton body out of the sea like a rocket, arguing against gravity, arguing against friction, reaching, turning, fins flailing as it carved an arc back down to the ocean where it hit with a clap and an almighty boom; I had been close enough to smell the rank, shrimpy exhalation for minutes after the leviathan disappeared beneath the dark waters. The last time I had seen a whale breach like that had been in 1986. Spring 1986, early in the morning, the air biting with salt and cold as it misted up from the rocks, their atoms hammered out from the waves as they wrecked themselves upon the land, I had seen the whales breach, I had heard of the shuttle lost. In 1986, I spent my nights as the caretaker of a marine amusement part, keeping company with couple of crazy orcas and about a dozen bottlenosed tursiops and one common dolphin named Coop. On that morning, I had watched Halley’s Comet disappear as a white smudge in the morning sky. I did my rounds, walking along the coastline at the shift’s end, less interested in the group of reporters that had been milling about the Marine Mammal Care and Rehab Center above the yellow-white bluffs of the marine park and more interested in finding my pillow to daysleep the morning hours away. The journalists were there to interview a research team stationed on the property, the team nothing more than a bunch of volunteers, bored housewives and retired fudges with tan and wrinkled skin, who took a daily census of gray whales swimming from Baja to Alaska and then back again. It was a very cold morning, the morning the whales breached, colder than was usual even by California standards. Gray whales, wearing their overcoats of fatty flesh and barnacles, looked as if the winter had been too tiresome a burden to bear in their transmigratory journey, their wheeling duck and dive pattern was less like a lullaby and more like a death march.
There was one whale that morning that breached seven times, lifting its body out of the Pacific blue water until its school bus sized body of flesh, blubber, mind and bone fell back with a whomp, only taking enough time between to reset and try over again. The whale census takers watched and interpreted, saying the whales, the Eschritius robustus, as they were proud to say in scientific latin dichotomy, did the tour je aires to get rid of the irritating crustacean hitchhikers and giant lice parasites that ate away their flesh from the moment they were born until long after they were dead. I felt the whale was jumping for something else. Seven times the whale breached, breaking itself in shattering spray from torso to tailfin, spectators counting to seven as the whale disappeared under the froth of the freefall, when a security guard came down the hill. He announced his arrival by calling out to the Times reporter that her editor had called with an urgent message, urgent enough to drop the whale “warm and fuzzy” fluff and call immediately for real news of the real sort that affected real people. I waited with the whale watchers as the rest of the group caught up to the reporter who, finishing her phone call, told us as the nation and world was already watching in replay over and over again on all the major television networks; the Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded in its ascent to the stars, falling back to home, crew and craft destroyed.
Do humans lack so much memory that it drives broadcasters to replay and replay the tragedies of life, just to be sure not a microsecond of carnage gets underevaluated? The replays of the shuttle’s rising trail of vapor climbing into the blue and bursting into golden fire and falling tears of debris; the replays of a man surrounded by men in black as they beat him into submission and into submission and into submission again; replays of a white S.U.V. racing with police cars chasing and chasing, the replays of white highway lines keeping heartbeat pace and replays of a New York skyline in morning light, one tower on fire as a second waits as an airplane’s silhouette approaches over and over and over again, the outcome never changing no matter how many times it’s re-played.
Yet, the whales breach again, each time dreaming of respite from the parasites that feed on flesh, from the gravity that pulls them down into the depths. Still, the feeding continues and gravity pulls them down and down and down again.
I remember my sister and wonder why I didn’t make the call, knowing what I knew and my memory submerges and 1986 is gone. Somehow I re-surface in 2003, the marine park now sold off and abandoned, meditating on the floor buttons in an elevator in a U.C.L.A. parking garage after class late on a Tuesday evening. A couple of women stepped in continuing a conversation that had begun long before and would continue long after.
“We’re going to be right there at the Space Center and she said that it’s an incredible roar being so close to the launch site.”
My eyebrows lift as my eyes left my mantra with the glowing numbers mark our ascent.
“Don’t they worry about, like, well, if you might be a terrorist or something?”
“I guess not. We’re going to a dinner the night before with one of the actual astronauts. The Indian one, I think.”
There was an immediate burning inside my chest, so strong was my desire to join in on this private conversation held in a public elevator. The woman was young and excited, about to go on an adventure to the Space Coast, the east coast of Florida, near Cocoa, near Merritt Island. I wanted to tell her how the show was not just incredible but phenomenal, like a reverse lightning bolt on a clear blue day, the white light of liquid fuel ignition followed by a rising, brilliant jewel of human genius.
After the rise and a breath holding of time delayed the sound which followed as a thousand point-blank thunder rolls came in through your toes when the sonics kicked in and penetrated into through flesh and into soul. Evanescently, the explosion faded away and left as a sparkle and a whisper of the vibration that had roared forth upon lift-off.
I had seen the space shuttle lifting off in February in 1985 from a viewing spot coveted by seasoned shuttle watchers along a small stretch of Highway 1 that paralleled the Banana River. I had been living with the alien who worked at the Kennedy Space Center. Her name was Leanne and she had a condo a quarter mile from an unobstructed riverside viewing spot and by the time I walked out to find my best vantage point there was not even space for a motorcycle to park within ten miles of the K.S.C. The spacecraft had disappeared from sight, her bags packed, and her astronauts ready to work. As the vapor trail faded in the morning sky, I went back to Leanne’s place, backed my own bags and left for good. I had my own work to do.
Leanne and I had met years before at a comic book convention in Boston. She was wandering the lobby wearing a jacket that was a copy of the kind worn by the crew of the spacecraft Kishanti from the water world of Naru. “The Naru Chronicles” was an obscure comic book series with a limited run in Asian markets that had been translated to English in a time before Pokemon cartoons had made anime and manga art popular in the states. Long-legged women with round, expressive eyes and short, cheeky skirts were superheroes aboard the ship Kishanti, unlike the American comic book counterparts of the 1970’s with double the breasts for half a brain. Leanne and I crossed paths in the Grand Hall of the Comicon and it was as if we were twins, separated at birth, meeting for the first time.
“I know who you are.” I said, indicating her homemade bright orange and blue uniform.
“And who the hell are you?” Leanne’s response, I was to learn, was intrinsically her style.
“I am like you.” I said, still knowing nothing about her. I was young then, and quick to share my little stories, written in Narubian voice in those days when classrooms were a slave ship of tedium. Leanne read my fanfiction stories and asked for more and soon letters and stories were flying back and forth across the void of loneliness the two of us shared. There is a passion only Trekkies and Jedis and other fanatics share, locked as we are outside of the reality of mere mortal men.
We were as dissimilar physically as two women could be: she was tall, blonde and hefty in the hips, confrontational in style and lacking in any kind of interpersonal grace. I was short and thin with black eyes to match my ebony black hair long before matching contact lens to hair dye was a readily available as a fashion statement.
After the convention, we became as close as siblings, bonded by a mutual connection to a fictional alien world. I was lonely and quiet but curious after years in high school spent in mindful isolation. I had learned the skills of social extroversion but preferred the comfort of the internal. Leanne was different, intelligent but infinitely arrogant, proud of her daily affronts to any person who thought they knew more or better than she. I was intelligent, too, but in a way that Leanne refused to acknowledge. It finally made complete sense when, after a year of writing stories of Naru that seemed more real than fiction, we discovered in mutual enlightenment that we were both alien beings hiding inside our human selves. We were both lost but surviving on island Earth dealing with the gravity and a humanity that weighed us down and down again.
The problems between Leanne and I began when we discovered we were from aliens from different spheres of existence. I’m not talking about Mars and Venus but we were from realities that co-existed on different phases of the multidimensional plane. There are no complicated scientific validations that describe in words the physics of how I got to inhabit a human body in this version of Earth reality. The technical specifications of hyperspace identity travel are readily available on the shelves of most used comicbook stores. It doesn’t require a Ph.D. in theoretical quantum mechanics to make use of the interdimensional highways of the universe. Any human being open to the challenge could do it. Despite Leanne’s claims of needing “beyond human intelligence” to master dropping-in, I knew it only needed a small amount of genius unrelated to I.Q.
I just hadn’t figured out that Leanne’s particular alien bend on reality as a drop-in until after I had moved to Florida from my base station in Maine. I had taken an internship to work with dolphins at an aquarium too close to Leanne’s home to turn down an opportunity to move in with a fellow non-Earth soul. She knew those things only other interspace travelers and Narubian-types knew. We were both alien sisters on Earth, for sure, but it was only after I was drawn into Leanne’s transpersonal drop-in reality did I figure it out that I didn’t share her hellish zeitgeist, her disgust with the human life form she had adopted as her own. I was a swim-in alien. For all her intelligence, Leanne never figured out the difference between us.
Leanne and I had gone body-surfing one day at the stretch of Playalinda Beach that was open and empty from the area just below the shuttle gantry to all the way up to the hotels of Daytona. Leanne’s non-alien brother, John, an accountant, had come along for the ride. I was hopelessly addicted to body-surfing and in December, the beach was deserted in the early morning mist except for the human John, the alien Leanne and me. That wasn’t counting the great blue heron that stood watch in its one-footed yoga posture, silhouetted against the morning sky as the space shuttle Atlantis in its gantry cage towered above the horizon beyond. The big, blue bird hardly gave us a glance, it was the Portuguese man-o-wars washing up with the tide that posed a greater danger but even their blue-bottle bodies were not enough to keep the three of us from surfing on the sand bar that had built-up offshore.
Body-surfing was just so similar to transdimensional travel that the water temperature and threat of man o’war stings were but a mild distraction. I had swum into my present body in Maine in winter, a state of mind and geography which were both ultimately uninviting for surf-sport. Even the coldest water day in Florida was no where near as cold as the summer ocean temperature off Bar Harbor shores. Body-surfing at Playalinda had the affect on both mind and body of bringing me back to the moment of inhabitation of my flesh and bone and soul. My birth memories were re-visited upon the ocean; I simply settled into the great womb and rocked into the rhythm of the flow. The wave came in as a swell of speed and power, I placed my intent in the rise of the curl and then I flew with such joy and abandon and hope toward the shore. Beyond the break, dolphins wheeled and rolled in an ecstasy of their own. The dolphins had figured it out a long time ago.
Leanne always rode the first of the incoming swells even though the next in the set was often a better choice. That was one of the first clues I had that Leanne didn’t swim-into being as I had. The second clue was that Leanne consumed alcohol and sex in inhuman quantities, all the while insisting that her non-human alien qualities gave her the benefit of reason and rationality denied to human drunks and tramps. It was in her regular binges of vodka and milk that Leanne raged about the unfit state of humankind to rule a planet. Humans were stupid, slaughtering not only themselves but slaughtering whales even as they sang their hyperdimensional poetry. Human beings were drowning dolphins in nets even as they neared their critical mass for their morphogenesis. Leanne knew the right way for humans to think and the poor species were their own obstacles to understanding that one way. Part of her mission and a large part of her energy was spent to tell them so.
Leanne, in her reality, thought for sure that I was in bed with her brother because she couldn’t have a second conversation with a man and not end up in bed with him. Leanne never coupled with a complete stranger but only those men who she felt she could gain some conquering power. She kept a file on each of her regular partners, carefully separating their visitations and even though she rarely, if ever, encouraged a connection beyond the plug-into-a-socket act. These men wrote love letter after love letter begging Leanne for a more permanent lock on her energy. Those letters were placed in file after file with the bearers name and a response, duly dated and photocopied before mailed. Her response only invited the correspondent-lover to come by for a visit and a little something more but never, ever anything permanent.
In my hindsight, I see a letter addressed to me. Come to Florida and play, we’ll have fun writing stories. One day I see my file, with my name filled with copies of my letters, her letters and my stories.
Leanne’s alienation grew with each human encounter. She would speak foul-mouthed epithets in running commentaries of her contempt of all men as she did for most humans. For a while, being an alien as she, I was spared the wrath of her soul-shrinking attacks but all that changed one day when she saw me connect to the dolphin.
We had gone to the Keys for a weekend scuba diving experience at Pennekamp State Park. Underwater, Leanne was more interested in exploring the dead shipwrecks whose wooden spines provided a reef for the colonies of Christmas Tree worms to call home. She found a pleasurable fascination in harassing their feathery tendrils back into their wormy tubes over and over again until the creatures were too stressed to come out, at all. Satisfied, she would float over to a new set of worms to ultimately train into submission. In her mind, she filed them away for another day’s play.
I had come to see the Christ. The shallows of the reef of the state park was home to a bronze statue of Jesus of Nazareth, his arms held high overhead from a pedestal on the sea floor, his outstretched hands reached permanently skyward. Through the refracting turquoise light, his stigmata scarred palms embraced his Father, the Father many humans called God. Leanne wanted nothing to do with the icon but the dive boat captain had Jesus as the second stop on the itinerary du jour and no matter how Leanne berated and demanded that the captain go elsewhere, there was nothing in her alien powers that could change the dive schedule.
Leanne was true in her prediction that there was nothing to see at the Christ. The water was crowded with novice divers and snorkelers, the coral heads were dead from too many hands touching and stressing and pressing and damaged by too many anchors dragging over the same spot of underwater parkland. Yet, the bronze and manmade symbol of transcendence beyond flesh inspired once more the feeling of the waveshift that had brought me to Earth such a short time ago. Leanne could barely stand to look at the metal structure imposing itself on the dying coral, symbolizing the worst of metaphors of the effects of human morality on the natural world. Many of the divers around us reveled in an ocean epiphany while she silently encouraged a stormfield, magnified in the rarified and translucent water, encouraging the waves to drown the novice divers hovering in the glow that silhouetted the Christ image. She waited but no waves of destruction floated by.
On the deck, Leanne incited the wave again but it appeared only as words of vehemence out of her mouth unleashed at the boat captain. I was her dive-buddy and even though I pleaded with her to stop, we were both banned from ever diving on that boat ever again.
After showering at the Howard Johnson and after Leanne started breathing in her liquid diet of vodka with milk, we went to the roadside attraction that was cheesy in its pirate-themed bacchanalia and inviting dolphin show. The dolphin pool was open and even natural in its construction from an existing salt water lagoon. With great relief, the trainers stayed away from the usual scripted entertainment format and spoke directly to the audience about the resident bottlenose dolphins, five tursiops truncates, and about the unique and intelligent beings they were on their own terms. The cetaceans were described as aliens on earth with their home planet as the sea. For Leanne, they fit her description as fellow travelers on the Starship Kishanti, all stranded on Earth from their homeworld Naru.
We followed a small group of human tourists allowed down to the floating training platform so that we could touch the rubbery skin of the tursiops and see, up close, the dolphin’s forever smile. The handful of kids took their turn first, huddling up close to pet the big mammal while the trainer, shoveled fish into her lapping pink tongue. Satisfied with their encounter, the children ran back up the ramp to the stadium were their tourist parents listened to the excited chatter about how they had “petted the dowfin.”
Only Leanne and I remained when I reached my hand down, sending a flow of energy intently between us before fingertips touched the melon forehead, the acoustic lens to the dolphin mind. A sonic song burst forth from her as waves of excited energy fields rolled through the dolphin-alien connection to the universal flow. Pulses beat back and forth between our souls until it was clear that the message had been received and we were once again two separate harmonies. Leanne was aware of the song but was like a drunk trying to sing a hymn on Sunday morning while still under the influence of a Saturday night bender. I knew what was going to happen before it did but it wasn’t any super-prescient power that saw it coming.
Leanne reached her hand toward the dolphin’s head and with a SQUAWK! It flung its breached body from the platform. The trainer offered out a handful of smelt with signs and whistles as orders for the dolphin to return. The dolphin, the intelligent tursiops, had rejoined her small captive pod, swimming and circling in the inland sea unconvinced to do otherwise. The trainer smiled an impermanent smile to the crowd and cut the script to the end of the show.
That was also the final cut of the tenuous threads connecting Leanne and I together as mutual alien explorers of the Earth experience. In both our minds, the spaceship Kishanti had crashed and was damaged beyond planet-bound repair. In my mind I knew that Leanne had dropped into the human experience of ego when she traveled from her dimension to this one and I suspect now that ego was an intrinsic element in her ability to shift planes of reality. The cost of the trip was incredibly high because the more she explored ego in a human body on the Earthly realm, the more tragically Leanne traveled away from the Source of her alien power. She might not be able to return home, at all, which ironically put her in an inferior position to most of the humans she condemned for being themselves. Leanne was disconnected and separate, a dead ship at sea waiting to become the tomb that would eventually end up as a home for worms.
After the diving the Keys, after the intimidations and the daily, small humiliations Leanne inflicted upon me as she felt was her right and duty to do in training me to be “less human” and “more alien” she finally lumped my type of otherness into the same category of other Earthlings; insufficient, inferior and better to remain un-evolved and best yet, to be dead. How strong the bond had been for me to stay there, accepted as a being different-from-humans but still never as good as Leanne-the-Alien-Other. I decided to go back to Maine. I would miss the waves of Playalinda, I would miss the wild surfing dolphins, and I would not see another hope-filled launch of humanity trying to reach beyond the apron strings of mother Earth.
The day of the space shuttle launch, I was up early enough to see Leanne leave for work but she didn’t see me. I watched from the top of the stairs as she took out a sixteen ounce glass and filled it with vodka. She then opened the refrigerator and took out the carton of milk and tried to add some of the white fluid to the already brimming glass of clear alcohol. It was 7:30am.
I expected Leanne to pour out some of the vodka to make room for the milk only I didn’t think as an ego-alien did. Leanne reached into the cupboard and pulled out a twenty ounce glass, added the milk and then more vodka to top it off. She finished the glass before leaving for work at the Space Center at 8:15am. Leanne was working as a safety engineer for the morning’s launch. Later that evening, as the sun was descending below the tree line of the Florida swamp, I read the “Welcome to the Sunshine State” backwards in my rearview mirror.
It was within three months after I returned to Maine that I moved to California and became the night caretaker at Marinelife Park. I spent the graveyard shift connecting to dolphins, singing to orcas and watching the waves pound on the rocks of the California shore as gray whales commuted by under moonlit skies. Marinelife Park closed its doors permanently shortly after Challenger exploded and all the dolphins were relocated, some to parks in Oklahoma, others to tanks in Wisconsin, all isolated thousands of miles from the pulse of Mother Ocean. They were, undoubtedly, all mad by now. As mad as my alien sister, drunk on human ego and white Russians and the power of pleasure she had over men and over me.
Leanne tried to write once or twice as if our sisterhood was something in our mutual isolation that she should forgive me for my human qualities and for leaving her alone and without regret. After refusing to accept two of her letters, a final postcard arrived at my P.O. Box. The Postmaster held it for me personally and asked if I needed help with my problem correspondent. He allowed me to read the missive before returning it to sender as a refused item which was after he had a glance at Leanne’s caustic ego-madness unleashed in written form. The Postmaster shook his head for me and agreed to return all mail from this sender in the future. I never heard from Leanne again, at least I thought I’d never hear from her directly again until the business envelope arrived nearly twenty years later.
There are side effects to all poisonous encounters. I had become infected from my contact with the drop-in as if human ego was a virus that I had caught from such extreme exposure. Like a tumor, it grew into the most vulnerable part of my soul but eventually, I worked it and Leanne’s haunting voice of scathing reprimands out of my soul but minor flare-ups still attack me every now and then. A space shuttle explodes and the ego appears as I wonder who is to blame… is it the Space Center’s fault for allowing a human hating alien work to ensure human safety or is it me for not reporting an engineer with an all-too-human weakness for vice and delusions of megalomania?
It wasn’t until I learned to surf on a foam and fiberglass board and meditate in the movement of the California ocean that I began to meet up with other swim-ins. The experience of Leanne has left me wary and cautious, I barely connect to other humans never mind the many aliens I find walking and swimming among us. Any of them might be a drop-in traveler in disguise.
I was out surfing this morning, meditating mindfully as the sun warmed my body, the waves stretching and pulling my soul. Even the resident pod of wild dolphins moved in close but not close enough to sing the energy song. They had become mostly disconnected in the freakishly dirty and noisy world in the waters off the Southern California coast. I sometimes wonder how any of us survive. It was still a joy to see them roll through the waves.
Then, something wasn’t right. I felt a sudden convergence of energy fields turned particles to waves and shifted the world to favor coincidence. Serendipity and chance, things rarely happen in simultaneous order without a purpose. My stomach turned sideways. An excited roar of energy emerged from the rift and a gray whale catapulted itself from the ocean just beyond the break and fell crashing, reuniting with Earth’s mass under a force of gravity. My board rocked seven times as the wake rippling away from the whale’s descent passed beneath me. Here it comes again…
On the car ride home, my attention caught on a flash in the sky. There was no brightness but the unique shape of a biplane as it floated toward the airport a few miles away. There’s a problem with that aircraft, I thought, as I continued to ride the waves of coincidence from the rift in my reality. The plane disappeared out of view.
I learned on the evening news that the plane had crashed on the runway. The pilot was alive but horribly burned. I felt horribly burned and it reminded me of Leanne. The main news story that night was not about the local air crash but of the space shuttle Columbia that had burned up on re-entry over Texas on its way to the Banana River along the coast in Florida. I tried to hold away the thoughts that, after a thorough investigation, the direct cause of the shuttle failure would be found in an empty vodka bottle lying next to an empty milk carton somewhere in the Vehicle Assembly Building. I hoped those thoughts were merely the whisper of an ego-cancer looking for that vulnerable spot again. I chose instead to align with the song of grief and mourning rising from a humanity that might someday experience that shift to the critical mass necessary to travel beyond this humanly domain to other perspectives in other realities, realities that wouldn’t need technology and engineers and fragile spacecraft with fragile crew.
I keep myself warm with these hopes and also from the fire that burns the paper of business envelopes that arrive unbidden from galaxies unknown. I sit back and look at the earth from my own universe and know that this home is where I belong.
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